President Franklin D. Roosevelt Writes Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Their 1944 Quebec Conference, Arranging a Meeting to Discuss Allied Strategy

A great rarity, this is our first ever letter of President Roosevelt to Prime Minister Churchill, and to have it come from one of their wartime conferences is nothing short of extraordinary

The Quebec Conference in September 1944 marked the eleventh wartime meeting of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. They first met at Argentia, Newfoundland, in August 1941, when they proclaimed to the world in the Atlantic Charter, the war aims in which their democracies believed. The second meeting was in Washington two weeks after Pearl Harbor, when the fortunes of the United States were at low ebb as she prepared for involvement in the war. At that time the President and the Prime Minister made the most crucial decision of the war—to throw the main bulk of their force against Germany first and to defeat Japan later.

In the spring of 1944, Churchill proposed another conference. He suggested an Easter meeting in Bermuda but the President did not believe a meeting was essential at that time. But Churchill persisted and Quebec was agreed upon as the meeting place and September the time. In Quebec, agreements were reached to advance against Germany on two western fronts, on the Allied occupation zones in defeated Germany when the war ended, continued U.S. Lend-Lease aid to Britain, the role of the Royal Navy in the war against Japan, and a timetable to invade the Philippines. They also discussed plans to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

From August 18, when the President told his press conference that he expected to see the Prime Minister soon, the press speculated on a place and time for the conference, as well as the agenda. The fog of public ignorance was cleared on September 11 when the President and Prime Minister arrived in Quebec and their spokesmen announced that they were there to plan the knockout blow against Japan.

When Roosevelt and Churchill joined with their staffs in these discussions at Quebec, Allied fortunes of war were mainly favorable. American, British and Canadian armies had made a lightning sweep across northern France; on the first day of the conference elements of the Third U.S. Army driving east were joined by units of the Seventh U.S. Army pushing north and General Eisenhower then had an unbroken front from Holland to the Mediterranean. On the same day troops of the First U.S. Army entered Germany in force at three points. German strategy in the West had been a strategy of delay, buying time to strengthen the West Wall. The German High Command had made the grave mistake of leaving 200,000 men in the ports of Brest, Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais and Dunkerque. By denying those ports to the Allied Expeditionary Force the Germans had sought to restrict the Allies to the coast but they had greatly underestimated Allied logistic ability and Hitler now found the Allies probing the West Wall long before his army was sheltered behind it.

On September 11, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill arrived at the Citadel of Quebec at 10:25 a.m. After lunch the men visited FDR’s map room. Before leaving Washington the President had directed the map room to prepare charts, organization tables and graphs in order to demonstrate quickly the tremendous size of our naval force now stationed in the Western Pacific, with statistics giving an outline of the enormity of the logistics problem. This preparation was made in order that from the very beginning of discussions at Quebec there should be a common understanding of the naval problems and the difficulties of supply. With the help of the charts the President outlined the problem to the Prime Minister. The next day the party assembled in the conference room at the Citadel where the Prime Minister demonstrated some of the harbor models—ships and equipment used to form artificial harbors for the invasion of France—that he had brought with him from London.

On September 13, at 11:45 a.m., the Combined British and American Chiefs of Staff (Admiral Leahy, General Marshall, Admiral King, General Arnold, Brigadier General A. J. McFarland, Captain E. D. Graves, Field Marshal Brooke, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Portal, Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham, Field Marshal Dill, General Ismay, Major General Hollis, Major General Lay cock) came to the Citadel for a plenary meeting with the Roosevelt and Churchill.

On Thursday, September 14, President Roosevelt attended two separate conferences. The first one, at 11:00 a.m., was with Prime Minister Churchill and Mr. Richard Law, the British Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. The second, at 11:30 a.m., was with the Prime Minister, Secretary Morgenthau and Mr. H. D. White, an Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury. The President lunched at the Citadel at 1:00 p.m. with the Prime Minister, Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Churchill, Secretary Morgenthau, Mr. White, Mr. Law and Commander Thompson. Sir Anthony Eden, British Minister for Foreign Affairs, arrived in Quebec from London that afternoon. At 5:30 p.m., the President met with Prime Minister Churchill, Secretary Morgenthau and Lord Cherwell for discussions. The next day, at noon, Roosevelt met in conference with Churchill, Secretary Morgenthau, Lord Cherwell, Mr. Eden and Mr. Cadogan.

At noon on the 16th the second plenary meeting of the conference was held at the Citadel with the President, the Prime Minister, and the British and American Chiefs of Staffs attending. This meeting marked the close of the 1944 Quebec Conference. At 3:45 p.m., the President, Prime Minister Churchill and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King held a joint press conference on the sundeck of the Citadel for the more than 150 press correspondents gathered in Quebec from all over the world to cover the Quebec Conference.

This is the very letter President Roosevelt sent to Prime Minister Churchill on September 14 to arrange their 11:00am meeting that day. Autograph letter signed, the Citadel, Quebec, September 14, 1944, to Churchill. “Dear Winston, 11 AM is all right. Hope Anthony [Eden] is in safely in spite of the weather which has closed my nose. FDR.” The verso is addressed “The Prime Minister” in FDR’s hand. Needless to say considering the extreme rarity, this is our first letter of President Roosevelt to Prime Minister Churchill, and to have it come from one of their wartime conferences is nothing short of extraordinary.